Saturday, March 6, 2004

E Pluribus Trivium

I wrapped up Scholes' Rise
and Fall on Monday morning while I was waiting in the auto shop.
Since then, I've been reconsidering it from a distance--the full displacement
brought on by a hearty paper load, full-time work, and other important
stuff-o-life. I keep coming back to a few basic ideas set up by Scholes in
chapter four, "A Flock of Cultures." Throughout, Scholes uses a
split chapter system, so, for example, chapter four has a postlude called
"assignment four" in which he details--in practical terms--an
application of much of the theorizing he summons in the early portion of the
chapter. Before the "assignment" section, he proposes a
design for a general education curriculum parsed into grammar,
dialectic and rhetoric. Scholes introduces this threesome under the
heading, "A Trivial Proposal." He's having fun with the
connotations of "trivial,"
enlisting it as something of lesser consequence (than the Western Civilization
and Great Books canonical approaches) and also as a modern resurrection of the
medieval model for foundational education--the basis preceding advanced
scholarship in "arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music." He
explains the subtle differences between each of the course-types. For grammar,
a course called "Language and Human Subjectivity" would comb over
pronoun usage and alienation in language structures. A second grammar
course would concern "Representation and Objectivity."
Anthropological perspective, ethnography, the objective discourses pervasive in
the observational sciences: these would be done up in this second grammar
course. For rhetoric, he suggests a course on "Persuasion and
Mediation," which "would obviously include the traditional arts of
manipulation of audiences but would also point toward the capacities and limits
of the newer media, especially those that mix verbal and visual textuality to
generate effects of unprecedented power" (125). To round this one
out--and because Scholes spends relatively little time on it--I would toss in technology.

Til now, I've summarized Scholes, little more. I still have to wrestle
with his course concerning dialectic. He dubs the course "System and
Dialetcic." The purpose is philosophical grounding, critical
positioning, reason and logic, historical antecedents, and leverage in rich,
complex, and intertwined discursive legacies. Good enough. But this
brings me back to something Scholes writes about Hegel earlier in the chapter,
and it brings me back with a sense of thin (okay, nano-thin, but even
nanotechnology can achieve conduction.) connection to parts of what Collin wrote
the other day, especially on deference to "the field" or "the
discipline" of Composition Studies. From Scholes:

As I have already partly indicated, I believe that our tendency to speak in
terms of Western Civ is derived from the degeneration of Hegelian ideas into
the repertory of "common sense." I call this a degeneration because,
in this passage from systematic thought to folk wisdom, Hegel's ideas have been
separated from the rationale that drove them. By putting them back in
their Hegelian context, I hope to show both what they have lost in this
transition and how we shall have to adapt and modify them to make them useful
again for curricular purposes. Let me begin this complex process by
pointing out that for Hegel the idea of studying the West without the East
would be ludicrous. The basic principle involved here is Hegel's view of
history as a dialectical process, in which the new always results from the negation
and sublation of the old, in which certain elements of the old are retained
within the new synthesis. By seeing the West as the dialectical heir to
the East, Hegel incorporates understanding of the East as a necessary part of
the study of Germanic (or Western) culture. (114)

From here, I don't want to ratchet into too-tight conclusions; this is a
tentative think-through--one that I hope carries over into more questions for
other days. It's just that "negation and sublation" are
variously deliberate (active) and inadvertent (passive), but they're paramount
to the dialectic process of forward-moving transformations informed by history.
Taken another way, I suppose we could call them corrosive to our sense of
shared values (about best practices, say), of a social network, or to the field
or the discipline, set apart by "its own momentum and character as an
organization." I've typed right up to a crossroads here--one that I
know needs more deliberation, more consideration. It's just that Scholes
is whispering "dialectic," as I'm reading Milgram, reading "agentic
shift." Scholes is winking me back to this passage on Hegel (which
rings of authority, canon, discipline, globalism), and I'm trying to play along,
sputtering at times, but trusting that this will come together, that a refined
understanding will come about from this search. And maybe Scholes is there
because, in proximal terms, he was there most recently--Monday--as I read and
waited for the oil change. Will he still be there tomorrow? Will
Hegel? Will the East? Abstraction and shift, abstraction and
shift. To what end?

A few more quick notes on Scholes and his curricular trivium. I like many things about it, and I see ways that much of it is already taking good form in the FY sequence, upper division WI courses, and interdisciplinary parternships. The model left me with questions about how composition already marries the trivium into a single course. All three parts, in
effect, share writing. Or writing shares them. Either way, the
composition classroom is where all of this is going on at once, yes? The
other angle of my critique of Scholes--and I noted it earlier--is the rather
buried issue of technology in his plan.

"There are free-floating top-dwellers that live and die in surf without ever seeing dirt beneath them. Complex ecosystems flourish in neritic pools and flatlands, sliding on organic scree to the edge of rock shelves and dropping into a zone below light" (1). Mieville, The Scar.